In Immigration Labyrinth, Corruption Comes Easily

By STEPHEN ENGELBERG,

Published: September 12, 1994

ARLINGTON, Va., Sept. 11—
Up and down the East Coast, the word quickly spread through immigrant communities. Come to the Northern Virginia offices of the Immigration and Naturalization Service. Bring cash. Buy the right to live or work in the United States.

Smooth-talking middlemen took care of the details, bribing immigration service employees with gold jewelry, free vacations and cash-filled envelopes passed hand to hand in the aisles of a nearby department store. Ghanaians, Lebanese and Salvadorans, among others, flocked to what quickly became a multicultural bazaar. Most came from the Washington area, but others drove hundreds of miles and scribbled phony local addresses.

Immigration service clerks, some whose take-home pay was as low as $250 a week, were eager to participate. "Money talks," one told a self-styled immigration "broker" who had recruited hundreds of Salvadoran clients. Another employee said she needed $50,000 to buy a house in Florida.

For two years, the bribery proliferated like a virus. "We let it happen," one employee involved in the case said in a recent interview. "There was no supervision to tighten down on us, and we let it go real wild."

Finally the Justice Department began an undercover investigation, and by the time prosecutions were completed six months ago, eight employees of the Washington district office stood convicted of accepting bribes. Altogether, the I.N.S. said, they had fraudulently given more than 4,000 people permission to work and sold legal residency to 1,000 more immigrants who did not qualify.

The scale of these abuses, documented in court records and described by some of those involved, has never come to public attention before now. Even the agency's senior managers were largely unaware of the case and its lessons. And the immigration service has still done almost nothing to avert similar problems in other offices.

The corruption in Arlington was not an isolated case. Every year dozens of I.N.S. employees are arrested on similar charges. But an investigation of major cases during the past decade by The New York Times has found that the agency has repeatedly failed to shore up security weaknesses, even when corruption arrests have exposed them over and over again.

The immigration service is an arm of the Justice Department, and it accounts for 21 percent of the department's staff. Yet Justice statistics show that 54 percent of the arrests within the department for corruption and job-related misconduct during the last three years have been in the I.N.S. -- 76 of them since 1992.

Immigration officials insist that only a tiny minority of the agency's 19,000 employees succumb to temptation. Still, present and former officials acknowledge that the agency's lax supervision makes dishonesty far more tempting than it should be. An employee weighing whether to take a bribe knows the "door is wide open," said James Dorcy, senior investigator of corruption cases from 1980 to 1990.

The immigration service's senior managers are well aware that they have a serious corruption problem. The Commissioner of Immigration and Naturalization, Doris M. Meissner, who took office 11 months ago, acknowledged in an interview that the agency's low pay, antiquated computer systems and far-reaching power over immigrants' lives can give a potentially dishonest employee both motive and opportunity. There is, she said, "a climate for abuse that doesn't exist in those other agencies."

Entry-level employees -- some earning barely more than the minimum wage -- grant coveted benefits to immigrants willing to pay any price to stay in the United States. Ms. Meissner noted that a few keystrokes on a computer or some misplaced files are all it takes to change a person's life forever.

The routine, unchecked flow of undocumented aliens across the borders makes it even harder for the agency to stanch corruption within its ranks. "There is this overwhelming attitude of: 'So many get through anyway, there's nothing to do about it. So why shouldn't I get some money out of it?' " said Robert E. Crebbs, a special agent in San Francisco.

Immigration service employees are constantly aware that no one is looking over their shoulders as they make decisions. Richard J. Hankinson, the Justice Department's Inspector General from 1990 until June, told Congress last year that this lack of scrutiny "serves to eliminate one of the traditional deterrents to crime: fear of getting caught."

Senior managers are hardly ever held accountable for corruption on their watch. Indeed, the top officers in the Washington district got bonuses for their work in 1993, the year several of the bribery arrests were made.

As Anthony D. Lazalde, a deportation officer in San Francisco, put it, "You can commit bloody murder and get away with it." The Promotion Trusted Employee Already Tainted

Although it is not one of the nation's immigration hot spots, the district office that serves the District of Columbia and Virginia is one of the nation's busiest. And like his counterparts in the service's 32 other districts, William J. Carroll, the director, continually pleads with headquarters for more people.